Alice in Wonderland

I'm sure if you look straight over the screen, you can see a wall. It looks (depending on the office you sit in) more or less solid, has a certain colour and you just start asking yourself why the heck this wall could be interesting! Think about the things you know about this wall: We all know this wall consists of different molecules and if we look even closer, atoms. For the sake of simplicity, let's think of atoms as spheres made of tiny electrons circling around a core (called nucleus). The size of the atom or it's nucleus depends on its type. Carbon for example has a atom size of 70 picometres (=0.00000000007 metres) and a nucleus diameter of about 2 femtometres (=0.00000000000002 metres). That means the carbon atom is about 35000 times wider than it's nucleus. If you imagine the nucleus to be the size of a football, the electrons would circle in a distance of roughly 4025 metres (=2.5 miles) around it. This means a lot of empty space! To emphasize this point a bit more: The volume of the whole atom is about 42875000000000 times bigger than the volume of the core!! So if we could look inside an atom, we wouldn't see much, would we?
Let's come back to our wall! The wall consists of many different atoms with different sizes. For this thought experiment, we assume for simplicity that the atoms in the wall are stuck together like a lot of small balls. We are looking at an awful lot of balls here! But we just calculated that an atom is mostly empty space, so a lot of atoms together (with small spaces in between them) are just more empty space dotted by very small nuclei.
So why do we see a solid wall? We are also made of atoms, so if we are only considering cores and electrons, I should be able to walk straight through! With the odd wall electron bouncing into one of my nuclei or electrons and vice versa! A bit of wiggling should do, to resolve this.
But I can't.
Why not? As it's mostly empty space, what keeps me from seeing through? As the atoms themselves have no colour, where does it come from? Why do the materials have different properties? They all consist of atoms, don't they? Ok, different types different properties, but diamonds and charcoal are made of exactly the same type! Would you put a piece of charcoal on a ring?

Even the most boring thing in the world (and I guess most people would consider a standard wall pretty boring) holds enough open questions for us to make it appear magical. We just stopped looking at items that we can see around us all the time . If you take the time and look closely at them, they all hold a door ready that leads into a magical world.

There are always more questions and there always will be. Don't stop asking them!
You might not find speaking white rabbits or hookah smoking caterpillars, but it is going to be a mind-opening and magical journey for sure!

Sven

P.S: I found the same idea in "The God Delusion" by Richard Dawkins. It seems I'm not the only one looking at walls in a strange way..... ;-)